What are we leaving to our children?

We all know today’s young people face an uncertain future, with high housing costs, youth unemployment and government spending cuts weighing heavily on them. This paper goes beyond these short-term problems to look at the big question which is looming on the horizon: what will be the legacy of the current older generation to today’s young people in terms of economic assets and liabilities?

This report represents the first major attempt to quantify the total value of all the debts being built up by today’s older generation which will be passed on to their children, and tries to measure the total value of all the assets in the UK to see to what extent they balance the debts.

The results indicate that the next generation in Britain is set to inherit a crisis, with the nation’s unfunded pension liabilities vastly outweighing the value of the resources which currently exist to pay for them. Today’s decision-makers urgently need to act to reduce the burden of these liabilities if they don’t want to be remembered as the generation which bankrupted its children and grandchildren.